Call for Papers: 55th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Nov.29th-Dec.1st, 2012- Philadelphia (USA)
Miraculous Riches & Foreseeable Futures:
Representations of Wealth and Pursuits of Value in Africa
Conference Organizers: George Paul Meiu and Joshua Z. Walker (University of Chicago)
The wealth that appears (and disappears) suddenly in social landscapes of economic hardship has long fascinated those struggling to imagine and produce livable futures. Ghostly riches with alluring surface appearances have long constituted central idioms for the imagination of social and economic value in Africa. At least since colonialism, the miraculous and abrupt appearance of large houses and big bellies, stacked granaries and overflowing bank accounts, Mercedes cars and private planes, dollars and diamonds have triggered social anxieties and suspicions. Meanwhile, such material signs of speedy enrichment were also fetishized indices of concrete possibilities and foreseeable futures. With market liberalization in Africa, narratives about quick wealth figure even more centrally in everyday struggles to imagine durable forms of social reproduction and value.
For example, analyses of value and social reproduction since the 1980s have showed how structural adjustment programs and the undermining of the state’s redistributive capacities intensified and diversified various kinds of speculative economies. Hence, while these economies have long existed, the current historical moment – where even the US dollar, otherwise the emblem of stable value, has become ontologically uncertain – demands renewed attention. We aim to extend these earlier approaches by analyzing the productive presence of miraculous wealth in social reproduction under global capitalism in the twenty first century. Our panel seeks to theorize the tensions at the heart of the production of durability in its material, moral, and symbolic forms. At stake in this exploration are the ways in which practices and objects are construed as durable and thus bearing the capacity to secure certain forms of economic production and social reproduction in the longue durée. Indeed, one of the key questions facing Africans today is the chronic condition of temporariness or lack of permanence in the attempts of African postcolonial subjects to create stability (or a sense of it) amidst uncertainty.
How do rapid riches figure in the speculative economies of contemporary Africa? What kinds of futures, temporalities, and pathways of social reproduction are at stake in “miraculous” wealth creation? How do particular kinds of practices, objects, or knowledge become construed as “durable” or enduring? How does miraculous wealth generate notions of un/durability of value and of ir/responsible
social reproduction? What is the relationship between representations of and practices surrounding miraculous wealth? How are different attempts to create enduring wealth and value morally evaluated in everyday life? How do people read the surface appearances of wealth as a way to represent the moral significance of their actions to themselves and others?
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to George Paul Meiu (meiu@uchicago.edu ) or Joshua Z. Walker (jdwalker@uchicago.edu ) by February 1, 2012.
Call for Papers: 55th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Nov.29th -Dec. 1st, 2012- Philadelphia (USA)
Études Africaines au Canada: Congrès Annuel du 2 au 4 Mai 2012 à l’Université Laval (Québec) Opportunity for PhD Students: The RSM Fellowships Program
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